CAA: GA News, "Monument to Flight, or Fancy?"

["Stephen Irwin" <stepheni@cwnet.com>]

April 3, 2000

MONUMENT TO FLIGHT, OR FANCY?
`Wing' commemorates Montgomery's alleged 1883 Otay Mesa launch 
Leslie Wolf Branscomb 
The San Diego Union-Tribune 


The Wing 

OTAY MESA -- When the sky is clear and the sun is just right, you can see
it from miles away: a giant silver airplane wing jutting out of the ground
and towering over the surrounding landscape.

It's not a remnant of a plane crash or a public art project gone wrong. It
is a monument to perhaps the most famous resident of the Otay area, aviator
John Joseph Montgomery.

Locals call it, simply, "The Wing." But few who regularly use the adjacent
park and recreation center know what it signifies.

The hillside where the wing is planted, with its sweeping westward view, is
supposedly the exact spot where Montgomery launched his glider on Aug. 28,
1883, thereby allegedly becoming the first person to achieve controlled
flight.

Allegedly.

The only witnesses who accompanied Montgomery when he accomplished this
feat, at age 25, were his brother and sister. No television crews, no
ticker-tape parade, just two young men and a girl on a windswept hill. Two
decades before the Wright brothers made their historic first powered
flight.

At a conference years later, Montgomery reportedly described his first
flight: "There was a little run and a jump and I found myself launched in
the air. A peculiar sensation came over me. The first feeling in placing
myself at the mercy of the wind was fear. Immediately after came a feeling
of security when I realized the solid support given by the wing surface."

Montgomery later became well-known for his gliders, and today a municipal
airport and two schools in San Diego County bear his name.

But there are those who don't believe that Montgomery took wing from Otay
Mesa eight years before German aviator Otto Lilienthal, who is generally
credited with the first glider flight in 1891.

"There are aviators who say it was impossible," said Edward Leiser,
historian for the San Diego Aerospace Museum. "People interested in the
history of aviation have strong feelings that no, he did not do it.

"It would have been nice if there had been a photograph of him doing it,
with a date on it," Leiser added, only half-joking.

Some who doubt Montgomery's achievement believe that Waldo Waterman was the
first man to fly a glider in San Diego County, from a hill near Balboa Park
in 1909.

"Waterman felt he was the first, and he was vehemently against Montgomery
being recognized as such," Leiser said.

"The museum doesn't make any big deal about John Montgomery. In fact, he
isn't even in the International Aerospace Hall of Fame, but Waterman is."

But keeping the Montgomery legend alive, and transforming it into accepted
historical fact, has long been a goal of a dwindling number of longtime
residents of the surrounding area.

"As far as I know, that was the actual site and I can't find anyone to
dispute it," said Wayne Dickey, who has lived near Montgomery Waller Park
for more than 30 years.

"As to whether it really happened or not, I feel certain that it did."

Longtime San Ysidro resident Joyce Hettich, 93, said she once met a man who
claimed to have witnessed the historic flight, but she doesn't recall his
name. "He was going rabbit hunting one morning and saw a wagon pull up with
two men and a girl," Hettich said. "He saw them fly it."

"The man confided that he finally stopped telling people because no one
believed him," she said.

This isn't a new controversy.

In fact, it was local pro-Montgomery sentiment that led to the
establishment of the wing monument in the first place.

More than 50 years ago, Bob Wilson, an aviation buff who was then president
of the San Diego Junior Chamber of Commerce, became enamored with the
Montgomery legend. Wilson established a Montgomery Memorial Committee and
set about having a giant wing mounted on a granite base.

The groundbreaking took place in 1946, and the first shovelful of earth was
turned by James Montgomery, the aviator's twin brother and then the only
surviving witness to the flight.

Hettich recalls meeting James Montgomery at the ceremony. "When James was
here, he took me to the seventh olive tree and said, `This is where I was
when it went over my head,' " Hettich said.

Also present for the groundbreaking was actor Glenn Ford, according to an
account of the ceremony written by Hettich's late husband, John Hettich,
that was published in the San Ysidro Border Press. Ford played the part of
John Montgomery in a film called "Gallant Journey," which premiered in San
Diego that evening.

"When they put up the monument, they had a big parade and they named
Highway 5 up to 28th Street in National City the Montgomery Freeway,"
Hettich said. "Nobody down here knows that any more."

The 90-foot silver wing -- from a World War II B-24 Liberator bomber -- was
dedicated on May 21, 1950.

"Some politicians in San Diego thought it should be visible from downtown,"
Dickey said. After it went up, some people claimed it could be seen from
the top floor of San Diego City Hall on a clear day, he said.

In 1964, the family of Luckie Waller donated an adjacent parcel of land to
be added to the park in their son's memory, and it was renamed Montgomery
Waller Park.

Occasional services

For 33 years, an organization called "Peace for the Skyways," which formed
in support of Montgomery, held occasional memorial services at the site. 
The last one, in 1983, celebrated the centennial of the disputed flight.

After that, however, the services ceased as its organizers aged and many
passed away. Wilson, who went on to become a U.S. congressman, died last
year at age 83.

Dickey, president of the Otay Mesa Friends of the Library, wants to
establish a display about Montgomery in the Otay branch of the San Diego
Library, which is across the street from the park. But so far the plan has
been stymied by lack of money and materials to display.

The Otay library only has one book about Montgomery, a biography by Arthur
D. Spearman, "John J. Montgomery: Father of Basic Flying," which treats the
first glider flight as fact, and a few old newspaper articles.

"People will come in and ask about it, and I'm embarrassed to say we don't
have much," said librarian Christine Gonzalez.

The California Room of the downtown San Diego Library has a few magazine
articles about Montgomery and a biographical file, said librarian Jane
Salvar. Montgomery is also profiled briefly in a book titled "San Diego
Originals," by Theodore W. Fuller.

Though Montgomery's initial foray into aviation may remain in dispute, his
later accomplishments are well-documented. By 1905, his gliders were so
famous they were being dropped from hot-air balloons over carnivals, so
fairgoers could watch in awe as the aircraft silently glided to the ground,
Leiser said.

Montgomery earned a Ph.D. from what is now Santa Clara University, where a
substantial archive of his work still exists. Among his varied
accomplishments, he taught mathematics at St. Joseph's College in
Rohnerville, built an experimental wind tunnel and invented an early
electric typewriter.

In 1911, Montgomery was experimenting with a new glider design when he
crashed to his death, leaving behind his wife of one year, Regina. They had
no children.

The San Diego Aerospace Museum has one of Montgomery's gliders -- the one
he was flying when he died. "I added to the exhibit a bit about the early
flight on Otay," Leiser said.

So it did happen?

"Sure. But that's just my opinion," Leiser said. "There's no way I can
prove it."
   Post your opinion on this story in the CAA General Aviation Forum
http://www.californiaaviation.org/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?conf=DCConfID2

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